


Take Wing

by blue_wonderer



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Cinnamon Roll Cisco Ramon, Cisco tries to help, F/M, Gen, Grief, Happy Ending, Ice Skating, Lisa finds out about her brother, Lisa tries to help too, Pre-Relationship, hand holding, hand wavy science explanations, references to canonical character death (Len)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 08:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13498626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_wonderer/pseuds/blue_wonderer
Summary: "The wind cuts into her cheeks, pulls her hair. Her clothes snap about her like a flag. Some people join her. Total strangers racing with her like a flock of birds in the golden sky, the sound of their skates and breaths and laughter like rushing wings."Lisa deals (or doesn't) with her brother's terminal foray into thrilling heroics. Cisco tries to help.





	Take Wing

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt: "Hi! So glad you're taking prompts! If you think you can, I found this one and would love to see it as a Goldenvibe: it's 2am and I'm drunk and I need some salt and I know you're awake so OPEN THE F*CKING DOOR"
> 
> ...This was probably meant to be a funny, cute prompt for a funny, cute fill. It... didn't turn out that way. I probably shouldn't be trusted with prompts in the future.
> 
> Set S3 of Flash. So, Invasion! Dante. Flashpoint. Iris. Savitar. Etc.

Mick isn’t the one to tell her. 

A blonde woman, shorter than herself, stares up at her with hard blue eyes as she reports what happened. The speech she gives is clipped and rehearsed. Militaristic. A bullet point presentation on how Lisa’s brother died. The woman is dressed all in white but she’s no angel. She uses eye contact like a battering ram. She doesn’t look away when she says _“Snart—Leonard—sacrificed himself for us. For you. For the whole goddamned world.”_

Is she supposed to feel proud? 

Mick stands behind the woman, leans against the doorframe like he can’t even bring himself to step over the threshold. He doesn’t look up. When Lisa is all bruised up by the woman’s unflinching stare she turns to Mick but Mick doesn’t meet her eyes. Years of bickering over Chinese leftovers and commiserating over Lenny and—and he can’t bother to be the one to tell her. Can’t keep his eyes off of his damned hands. The guilt he wears pisses her off. 

“Are you done?” She finds herself asking, cutting off the woman—Sara—mid-bullet point. Her features rearrange not in reproof but in empathy and it makes Lisa’s fingers itch to curl into fists. 

“One last thing,” Sara says and turns to Mick. His eyes skim the room, looking for ghosts. He runs a gloved hand over his head. Then he turns, hefts something up. A medium box—no, it’s made of wood. A small chest. He holds it out but still doesn’t enter. There’s an awkward moment where no one moves and a temper flutters across Sara's face—but then it’s gone. A grim mask stretching over bared teeth. She steps up to Mick, lifts the chest out of his hands. She doesn’t bend with the weight, muscles flexing beneath pale skin. She faces Lisa who makes no move to receive it. 

“This is for you,” Sara says and places it down on the floor like an offering. Lisa’s stomach drops with the bow of Sara’s waist. Ice crawls down her spine as the chest makes a _thump_ on her floor. 

“It’s… he wanted you to have it.” 

Is she supposed to feel happy? This box is, apparently, all she has left of… 

Is she supposed to feel _something_? 

“Are you done?” She asks again. She grips the handle of her gold gun. 

Sara backs away, slow and silent, never looking away. Mick turns and walks out. He never looks back. 

* 

Lenny was never in the habit of looking back, either. 

* 

She doesn’t open the box. 

* 

Lenny had gone longer without calling her. Once, they didn’t talk for nearly two years. 

She waits until Mick and Sara are gone. And then she goes shopping. She re-stocks her groceries. She doesn’t add hot chocolate mix and mini marshmallows to her cart. And then, after business hours, she goes _shopping_. She picks out new boots. A delicate golden bracelet. She goes home and watches TV and goes to bed and her ears ring from her cell phone’s silence. 

* 

Lisa didn’t have clever fingers like Len. Her mind didn’t work sideways and backwards like his. Puzzles bored her. Listening was hard. She didn’t see the point when everyone was just going to yell at each other anyway. 

Lewis had counted up her flaws like a discerning jeweler. 

* 

“Here to stop me?” Mardon sneers from the sky. Hail rains down over Central, shattering glass, puncturing metal, chipping concrete. 

He’s testing her, she realizes with a prickling, disgusted twist. Testing his boundaries. They both know what Captain Cold would say. _“This wasn’t our deal, Mardon.”_ _“Well if you’re out, you’re out.”_

(Lenny and Lisa’s world was intimidation and fear. In that way, and that way only, they were like Lewis.) 

Lisa holsters her gun and turns away, wondering why she’s still in this goddamned city. 

“Let it burn,” she tosses over her shoulder. 

* 

She doesn't sleep much but when she does she dreams. She expects to see Lenny but she never does. She never sees much of anything. Burning light and shadow. Fire that rips the flesh from her bones. Panic and sound like one long explosion that sometimes turns into an endless scream. 

* 

She’d never liked puzzles like Lenny, but she liked to play. She loved to run. When she learned to ice skate, she decided she liked that best of all. It was faster than running. It felt like flying. 

* 

He’s been knocking on her door for five minutes. She thinks about shooting him through the door. 

“Lisa, please.” 

His entreaty is so unbearably exposed. Even through the door he sounds like an easy mark. He _was_ an easy mark, once upon a time, and then he went a pulled a bomb out of her head and complicated things. 

Anyone only ever came to her when they wanted something, she muses as she stares at the door. Lewis did. Lenny, too, because he never learned a language different than Lewis’s. He’d say, _“I need your help on this heist”_ when he really didn’t. It was just easier than, _“how are you"_ and _"I'm sorry"_ and _"how about we meet up for coffee sometime and talk.”_

Mick had wanted… something from her on that day. Absolution, maybe. She doesn’t know. 

Lenny still wants something from her. Forgiveness. Understanding. It’s why he’d left her the goddamned box. 

She decides to holster her gun and open the door. 

Cisco’s hair shifts across his cheek with the change in air current. There are dark circles under his wide eyes. 

She thinks about tossing her hair over her shoulder, so her chest would oh-so subtly shift into his awareness to distract him, maybe throw his defenses enough to expose a weakness. Through trial and tears, she’d learned that it’s safest to start every interaction with any advantage at her disposal. However, she only manages a smirk, but it seems as hollow as a bird bone, and she’s entirely unable to wring out a sultry tone or teasing remark. Her offense brittle, her defense stale, she just doesn’t see the point. 

“Lisa,” Cisco breathes. “I—Snart, he—” 

“I know.” He blinks, startled at her tone. 

“Oh,” he sighs, shoulders slumping. “Oh. I—we—just found out and I—I wasn’t sure if anyone had…” 

“It’s been months,” she says, incredulous. “And you just found out? Don’t you hero types have a newsletter?” 

“I—you know, that’s a good idea, actually, because apparently it takes alien invasions to get everyone on the same page? And, uhm, I,” the corners of his mouth twitch and air rushes out of his nose, his focus turning somewhat thoughtful. “I think Snart would still object to that. You know. The ‘hero-type’ thing.” 

“Well,” she sighs, bewildered. “He can’t object to anything anymore, can he?” 

She turns and doesn't look back before closing the door in Cisco’s face. It feels good that she’s the one to do it, this time. 

* 

_“Where’s Daddy going?”_

_“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”_

_“Will he be back?”_

_“I hope not.”_

* 

_“Len—Lenny where are you going?”_

_“Out.”_

_“What if—what if Daddy—”_

_“Don’t worry about him, alright? I’ll be with him. We’re going to… get something and then we’ll both come back.”_

_“And do you think Daddy will be happy again? When he comes back?”_

_“I—yeah. Maybe.”_

* 

_“Len—Lenny—please"_

_“I won’t let him hurt you again, alright? I’ll be here.”_

* 

_“So goddamned useless,” Lewis snarls in her face and her shoulder is on fire._

_She screams and screams and no one ever comes._

* 

_“I have to go—for a job, Lise. I have to—I can’t just take you with me.”_

_“Will you be back, Lenny?”_

* 

Eventually, after Lewis is in Iron Heights, Lenny did come back. He taught her how to open safes. How to pick pockets. How to work a mark. They practiced expressions on each other and painstakingly erased each other’s tells. He let her choose her first job. And when they ran into the night with sirens lashing their heels and red and blue lights bouncing off Lenny’s wicked grin, it had felt like flying. 

He’d still been the one to leave. _“You don’t need me, Train Wreck.”_

Maybe she hadn’t. She didn’t know. Need and want had been a tangled-up thing for her—for the both of them—for too long. She’d been tired of Lenny speaking for her to herself, though, so she’d sassed back, _“Sounds about right—I was looking at a job in Coast City. Cushy payoff. Sparkly benefits.”_

They’d erased each other’s tells, so neither of them had known at the time that she’d been lying. 

She lies awake years later with the chest Lenny had left for her burning a hole in her closet. She feels the outline of herself melting into her bed, running into the gloomy room, slipping between the blinds and under the crack in the door. 

* 

Cisco comes back. She wonders how he knows she’s home. Or if he comes at this time every night, hoping to corner her. He knocks on the door. She doesn’t answer. 

“I’m here to, uh," his muffled voice flags as he scrambles for an excuse. "Borrow, er. Some. Salt?” 

She opens the door and raises an eyebrow at him. He blinks up at her like an owl caught in a beam of light. 

“For… tequila shots?” 

She raises her other eyebrow. 

“Not that… you should do tequila shots with me! I’m just. Asking. For a friend.” 

“Aren’t you supposed to ask for sugar?” 

He makes a contemplative face. “Sugar and tequila shots? I didn’t think that was a thing. Maybe I should try it.” 

“No. I meant the totally transparent lie to get in my apartment.” 

“Oh,” he grins, white teeth cutting across his fatigue, transforming him. “You’re referring to the classic Neighbor Trope. Where Neighbor A wants to get in to Neighbor B’s apartment and so A asks B to borrow their sugar. No. See," he holds up one finger. "That trope doesn’t apply here because we’re not neighbors. Also,” he adds with a second finger. “I feel like sugar has the wrong sort of implications.” 

Lisa leans on the door frame, crosses her arms, and smirks at the scientist. “And tequila shots at—two in the morning—don’t have the wrong sort of implications, Cisco?” 

Predictably he blushes, visibly swallows, and tugs at the hem of his rumpled, geeky t-shirt. “That’s not—well, when you say it like that… Two in the morning?” He interrupts himself, blinking and looking around as if noticing his surroundings for the first time. “I didn’t realize… is that late? Is that a time when people usually go to sleep?” 

“Been busy saving the world, Cisco?” 

Cisco rubs a finger up and down the bridge of his nose. “Just one person, lately. Which has turned out to be… _much_ harder than the world, actually.” 

Was she supposed to feel sympathetic? 

She did, a little. Not so much to the good fight or whoever the do-gooders were trying to save this week. But a little sympathetic to the dark circles under Cisco's eyes, the defeated slump to his shoulders, the rumpled state of his clothes. Cisco was... sweet. Wicked smart, but sweet. An easy mark a few years ago. An easy mark now, probably, though maybe a bit more challenging than she remembered, judging by a new guardedness in his bearing. She wonders what the world of heroism had dragged him through, what it had done to him to place this heaviness about him. 

(She wonders what it had done to Lenny.) 

"Why are you here, Cisco?" She asks wearily. She usually crafts her words, expressions, and body language with meticulous care. But she's honestly too tired. And too curious. Cisco had already done his good deed of the day when he came by to tell her about Lenny, even if he had been too late and she'd already known. "Do you want something?" 

He looks up at her, meets her eyes in a way that doesn't bruise. Whatever is there, kindness or empathy or _whatever_ , makes something in her crack for the first time in months. The release leaves her feeling even more breakable than before. 

"I... I was just. Checking in. Seeing how you're doing. I—well. I just wanted to let you know that I thought of you." 

She blinks at him, not sure what to do with this information, somehow feeling it much harder to accept than him taking a bomb from her head. 

"I'm fine, Cisco." 

He smiles at her, thinly, and she knows he doesn't believe her. She wonders what tells she forgot to cover up. 

This time she waits for him to walk away before closing the door. 

* 

When she dreams, she dreams of time travel and time ships. Except she doesn’t know what those things are, doesn’t know what they look like, can't quantify them. So, she dreams of fire and shadows that blind and sear, of running uphill with weights on her ankles. She’s too slow so she digs her nails into the ground, hauls herself onward by her knuckles. 

But it all smooths down in unbearable light. She gives way and falls. Wakes up and lies in bed with the outline of herself melting into her room, waiting for the emptiness falling in her to find the floor. 

* 

He comes back some time later (she’s not exactly sure how much later… the seconds seem to drag by, but the weeks have wings). Not at two in the morning but at twelve in the afternoon and Lisa is asleep when he knocks. 

She opens the door in a thin shirt and not much else, the gold gun in one hand. Cisco makes a visible effort to meet her eyes. "Is this a normal time when people sleep?" 

Headachey, groggy, and reluctantly amused, she says, "I'm probably not the best authority on normal sleep cycles either, Cisco." 

His gaze lands on something just past where she's leaning on the doorframe. "...Is that the Ming Dynasty vase that went missing from the museum exhibit last night?" 

"I have no clue what you're talking about," Lisa says, not even bothering to follow his line of sight to the vase with the delicate cobalt figures that sits innocuously in her entryway. "But it does go very well with the curtains, don't you think?" 

Cisco, surprisingly, doesn't bluster. He just pinches the bridge of his nose and rolls his eyes imploringly up to the ceiling. "Nope. Not talking about it," he declares. 

"Not even about how the The Flash didn't bother to stop me? A girl hates being ignored, you know." 

"Well. There was an incident last night. Also, the alarms didn't even go off until you were long gone. Not—not that I'm talking about it." 

She chuckles. It's the most honest smile she's felt since Mick and Sara showed up at her door. "You're cute, Cisco." 

He rolls his eyes again, but he still ducks his head in the tell-tale sign of a blush. 

"Look, I was just... checking on you. Er. Again." 

"I'm a big girl, Cisco." She feels a flash of annoyance, but it's a lot less acute, she suspects, than if it had been someone else at her door, nosing into her life. 

"Yeah, I guess," Cisco says. "Well. I don't know about you but I need a break. From everything. And. I wondered if you needed a break, too." 

"Are you asking me on a date, Cisco?" 

He _does_ sputter then. Tugs at his button-up and scuffs his shoe on the floor and everything. Adorable. 

"I... didn't think of it that way? I just. Hey. Uhm. Did you know... that I'm a meta?" He blurts out. 

She raises an eyebrow at the non-sequitur. "Interesting. I haven't heard anything about Flash getting a sidekick. Except for that cute kid in the yellow." 

"I—" he rubs the back of his neck and she has honestly never met anyone with so many tells before—someone who is so easy to read and yet so hard to predict. "I don't... it's not something that I— Er. _Anyway._ Let's just skip that conversation for now. The point is: If you could go anywhere, if you could see anything— _do_ anything. Right now. This very minute. What would it be?" 

She opens her mouth, blinks, and thinks wonderingly again, _so hard to predict._ "I'd like to go skating. Ice skating." She finds herself admitting, some part of her wincing at giving this bit of herself away. But she can't help it, not when Cisco is standing before her so earnestly, vulnerability in human form. 

"Cool. I can do that." 

"It's Spring." 

"Sure," he shrugs and she finds herself smiling at his casual confidence, so different from when they first met. "But I can do it. We don't even have to be gone long. You might want to change into warmer clothes, though. That is. Uhm. If you trust me? To take you there safely and bring you back?" 

She scoffs. Cisco is a do-gooder who probably helps elderly women cross the road and carefully releases any spiders he finds in his bathroom. He's the man who pulled a bomb out of her head—not because he owed her anything, not because he wanted anything from her in return, but simply because he's _Cisco_. "I could break you, if I wanted." 

Cisco laughs, a little rueful and flushed. "Yeah. I might have a type." 

That... actually makes her pause. She wonders if he's alluding specifically to another woman he's met. She finds herself slightly chagrinned at the idea of him crushing on someone else. 

She changes, taking her time with her make-up and hair. They convene on the rooftop where Cisco has to put on gloves and glasses (that remind her, achingly, of Lenny's ridiculous Captain Cold goggles). 

And then he reaches out, and the world bends at his fingertips. 

The brilliant, shifting glow of the portal reminds her of the light refracting in a flawless diamond. He holds out his other hand to her. He doesn't do anything. Doesn't say anything. He just waits for her to wrap her hand in his before they step together through the liquid diamond. 

They step out in a world that is as alien as it is beautiful. The sun is high in a clear, amber sky. A sunset in the early afternoon. 

The wind bites into her cheeks. The area smells of clean cold and wood smoke. A frozen lake stretches out before her as far as the eye can see. Dozens and dozens of people skate on it it's opaque surface like they're drifting on a cloud. Some twirl and jump. Others cling together, laughing hysterically when someone falls and brings the rest down with them. 

"What... what is up with the sky?" She asks, her head tilted back, squinting against the sun, trying to put words to the strange colors above her. 

"This is Earth 12,” Cisco says. The glasses and gloves are already tucked away and he's busy unearthing their skates from the duffle bag he carried. 

"Earth _twelve_? We're... we're on another earth?" 

"Yep. That's... part of my meta power," he explains without meeting her eyes. "Faster than a plane ticket." She wonders what other things his power can do. Where else they could go. What jobs they could pull. She almost wants to pout at him. Like The Flash, so much potential is wasted on the concept of _goodness_. 

"There are other Earths," she whispers. The amber sky shines down on the snow around them, on the ice, washing the whole world in gold. "I thought—I thought time travel was..." She trails off, makes a gesture with her hand. 

"Time travel is so five minutes ago," Cisco laughs, finally looking up at her, excitement sparking in his expression. "The multi-verse theory is actually really cool. Not sure if you’ve ever seen the show _Sliders_ , but it’s kind of like that. This Earth is a possibility of the Earth we're from. Or vice versa, depending on your point of view. This one, for example, had a really interesting thing that happened to its atmosphere a millennium ago, making it a little denser, so the blue light waves scatter more than our Earth and our eyes pick up more of the orange and red light waves, making the sky seem gold. There might be an Earth where the dinosaurs didn't die out. An Earth where you were born a boy. An Earth where you became, I don't know, an Olympic skater. Or where you're a meta." 

"Endless possibilities," Lisa echoes musingly. 

"There's one where Leonard Snart is the mayor." 

It hurts, she realizes, to think of Lenny alive, somewhere, but not _hers_. Still. She finds herself laughing a little at the very image. "You're kidding." 

"Harry—he mentioned an Earth one time where Snart is a super hero. Citizen Cold." 

She wonders if Citizen Cold was a selfish, self-sacrificing asshat, too, but she doesn't say that out loud. But she also doesn't feel that secret hole inside her grow bigger at the thought. In the end, the golden world is too pretty, and Cisco’s face too puppy-eager and happy, to think about such things. 

They put on their skates and venture out on the ice. Cisco is a truly abysmal skater. He falls, gets only a little embarrassed, but mostly smiles and laughs at himself. On his second fall she watches him struggle to get up a few times before reaching down to help him without thinking. He looks at her offered hand, moved by the gesture, before grinning up at her. Something in her softens at the smile lines around his mouth and eyes. 

She skates circles around him. Teases and flirts with him while he flails. And enjoys his look of absolute adoration as she relearns her balance and grace on the skates. 

And then she takes off. She builds up speed until her legs burn, totally unused to the exercise. The wind cuts into her cheeks, pulls her hair. Her clothes snap about her like a flag. Some people join her. Total strangers racing with her like a flock of birds in the golden sky, the sound of their skates and breaths and laughter like rushing wings. She pushes herself harder and harder until she outpaces them all and their calls and whoops follow her. She thinks she hears Cisco even above them, though he has to be too far away by now. 

And then she stops skating, lets her momentum carry her, her arms out, her head tilted back. She seems to glide forever. She feels the gold of the world suffuse her skin. 

Later, they sip a beverage that she's never seen on her Earth ("Earth-1", Cisco had called it), but is somewhat like hot chocolate. It's red and thick, syrupy, with a hint of spice and something else she can't identify. Maybe something completely native and unique to Earth-12. They skated for hours and they're both worn out, Cisco more so. He doesn't have much natural athletic talent, bless him, but he made up for it with studious determination. By the end of the hours he could balance and glide on one leg. He even managed a wide, meandering spin. He'd grinned at her when he did it, his joy a visceral thing. 

"Why?" She asks, finally. "Why all this? Why me?" 

Cisco looks at her and, to his credit, is completely honest when he says, "I'm not entirely sure. I—my brother. He. Earlier this year... The Flash, he... Anyway. It was—it shouldn't have happened. Dante shouldn't have died. It was a fluke of altered circumstances. A butterfly effect of choices and. I'm not saying... it's the same. As Snart." 

Something... anger, maybe. Exhaustion. Bitterness. Any or all of those things seep down her spine as he talks, straightening and hardening her back until she's sitting uncomfortably in her chair and glaring at the way his hands pick at the lip of his paper cup. 

They always want something from her, she thinks. They want and they take and then they leave. 

"You're right. It's not the same,” she says and hates the way she feels when she sees Cisco flinch at her tone. 

She stands up. Doesn’t look him in the eye. “I want to go.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

Her hand clenches to a fist at her thigh. She wonders why she didn’t bring the gold gun. “Now.” 

* 

Days pass. The weeks have wings. He doesn’t come back. 

* 

She expects to dream of light and shadow that burn her up. She expects to dream of flawless liquid diamonds and running with weights on her legs and falling through empty air. 

But she dreams of soft, golden light. She dreams of gliding effortlessly. When she turns, slicing through the air like a hot knife, she sees someone in the distance. She thinks it could be Lenny. Standing on his own skates. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t scream or shout out or disappear into unbearable darkness or flame. He just stands there in the golden world, waiting. 

* 

She knocks on his door again. She can feel him waiting her out on the other side. 

“It’s two in the morning,” he says. 

“I’m drunk,” she says back. 

“No, you’re not.” 

She holds up the tequila and lime. “We could be.” 

He opens the door. He looks like he’s been crying. She wonders if it's about his brother. Or if it's about the one person they're trying so hard to save. 

She doesn't know how to offer to help. It's a language she didn't learn from Lewis or Lenny. But she has her own. She can say, “We just need some salt.” She waves the tequila back and forth and grins. 

He smiles at her then. Close-lipped and sad but genuine because of _her_. He opens the door wider, offers to carry some of her burden. She hands him the bottle, steps in and closes the door, reaching down to wind her hand in his. 

**end**

**Author's Note:**

> @wonderingtheblue on tumblr


End file.
